Author Kim Moritsugu's blog. Once about food, now about TV recaps.

Month: July 2016

In which Mike gets beaten up, Harvey makes and breaks promises, we learn that Jessica and her beautiful hair live in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood, and Jack Soloff returns!

Prison Blues

Turns out Frank Gallo, tough-guy gangster and this season’s villain, didn’t fool Mike into pouring his heart out last episode in order to collect damning evidence against Harvey. All he needed to know was that Harvey holds Mike dear, so now he can hurt Harvey by hurting Mike.

Mike no longer trusts anyone, so he scorns his real cellmate, Kevin, who, despite his wise guy face, has a strong belief in staying out of trouble, especially Frank’s brand of it, which is why he let Frank take his place for Confession Night. But Mike is too much of a hothead to be cautious. When Frank threatens to distribute photoshopped nude pics of Rachel to everyone in the jail (a bit of a weak threat, IMO), Mike starts throwing punches.

The altercation lands Mike in Counselor MJW’s a bit too nicely decorated office (that lamp! the model sailboat!), where he’s told he has two options : work on rehabilitating himself by taking on a prison job, or spend a month in solitary the next time he is involved in an incident. And guess what was in the envelope of pics Frank brandished? Blank paper.

Donna has worked her magic to get Rachel on the approved visitor list at the jail with no waiting period. When Rachel hotfoots out there, she’s turned away because Mike has had his visitors’ privileges suspended for 2 weeks. She tries to get in as his lawyer, but the prison reception desk knows she is not Harvey, so no.

Harvey’s turn to visit Mike. Mike tells him about Gallo and the corrupt guards and Harvey reports that Gallo was jailed somewhere harder and meaner for racketeering when Harvey was the Assistant DA, but he must have been transferred to Danbury for good behaviour. Harvey wants to speak to the warden and get Gallo moved, but Mike makes him promise not to, he will take care of himself (because that’s gone well so far.)

On Harvey’s way out, Gallo taunts him from the exercise yard. Harvey wants to fight him real bad, and settles for twisting (breaking?) Gallo’s finger through a link in the fence (would there be that kind of openwork baseball field-type fence at a prison? Just asking.) Harvey tells Gallo to leave Mike alone, under pain of death by paid assassin or by Harvey’s own hands, take his pick.

Back at the office, Harvey lies to Rachel that everything is cool at Danbury, it was some other prisoner named Ross who was in trouble, but she sees through that and tells him he’d better deal with Gallo no matter what he promised Mike, or else (drum roll) she will never forgive him!

Harvey returns to prison and tells Mike he wants to ask Cahill AKA our old buddy Keyhole of the Justice department to get Gallo moved, and Mike says okay, fine, and he will be sure not to get caught alone with Gallo until then.

Naturally, he gets jumped by Gallo and his two goons soon after, in a common area which, on Gallo’s cue, is quickly emptied of other inmates and guards. Gallo is about to stick a shiv in Mike when Cellmate Kevin brings a (temporarily?) non-corrupt guard to ask what’s going on. “Nothing,” says Mike, because he understands how prison works now. Later, in their cell, Mike thanks Kevin and Kevin explains he wanted to make up for having let Gallo into the cell, something he only did because he was afraid. There’s one account paid.

Battle of the Longhairs

Harvey meets Jessica outside her spiffy Avenue Road apartment building (check the blue street sign in the background) with coffees, and they go into the office to find it bustling with people who look like staff and associates. They’re actually movie extras (played by TV extras, in a meta move) Louis hired to make the company look like it’s not a sinking ship. When Jessica, in her ridiculous bridal-adjacent white peplum jacket, points out they need to look poor because they want to settle the class action lawsuit for 10 cents on the dollar, Louis fires them.

That leaves Gretchen and Donna as the only support staff. While chilling in the executive kitchen with Jessica, Gretchen observes how much blacker the firm is now, at 50% (that’s 3 out of 6 employees, including Rachel). This comment earns her a fist bump from Jessica, and a questionable remark from Donna that she is black inside.

Gretchen later takes exception to this, and Donna shows her cell phone pics of an unseen, unnamed possibly famous recording artist she once dated. I guess he must be black because her past relationship with him is proof of, wait – what, exactly? I didn’t get it, but Gretchen seems convinced.

Jack Soloff and his amusing pro baseball player hair try to sue Jessica for his partner money, which he needs to buy into Robert Zane’s firm. Jessica tells him she can’t pay him back without paying back all the other partners, and asks Zane to make Jack stop suing her. Zane does call him off, which means Jack is ruined, but at the last minute, Jessica lends money to Zane to lend to Soloff for the buy-in because she’s the one who got Jack into this mess. And that’s a second account paid.

The settlement of the class action lawsuit is about to be ratified in court when Harvey’s old Harvard nemesis Elliot Stemple holds up the proceedings with an objection that one client (Jack Soloff’s!) was wrongfully excluded from the suit. Harvey offers Stemple money to withdraw, but all Stemple really wants is to get a piece of Harvey in retaliation for Harvey’s past aggressions.

His price is $20 million or the cartoonish duck painting Harvey has always kept in his office, which Stemple deduces must be valuable to Harvey. Harvey gives up the painting though it represents the one happy memory he had of his mother. That’s a third account paid.

Next week: Mike works in the prison kitchen, Frank Gallo is still a menace, and Rachel opens her apartment door when she maybe shouldn’t.

The Suits Season 5 finale ended with Mike entering the Danbury prison, and his law firm compadres returning to the Pearson Specter Litt office to find the premises abandoned, all partners and staff gone. The season 6 premiere starts minutes later – the series did not flash-forward two years to Mike’s emergence from jail, as a wag of my acquaintance had hoped. But this cleaving of the 6 principals – Mike on the inside, the remaining 5 on the outside – into two separate story lines and settings makes the episode easier to recap, so yay, and here goes.

Mike’s First Day and Night in Prison

Over a montage of Mike’s pseudo-hipster hairdo being cut down to a more jailhouse-appropriate style, a guard intones the prison rules, which Mike will be resistant to, because he is Trouble (the word is this week’s drinking game prompt) and a nose-thumber at authority, while also being a naif who is so not prepared for even a country club jail, despite Harvey’s efforts at toughening him up by throwing a crystal glass in his general direction last episode.

Mike is so unready he thinks that his meeting with new recurring character #1, prison psychologist (or he is a social worker? guidance counselor?), played by Malcolm Jamal-Warner, is about friendly banter and more Shawshank Redemption movie quotes. Not quite. MJW makes Mike wait hours to hear that his psych assessment reveals he has narcissistic tendencies, which he needs to do something about so he can leave prison a better man than he went in.

Mike’s it-looks-like-cotton prison shirt is a pretty shade of blue that brings out his eyes, because TV, and also in the tradition of another blue-eyed Mike, played by my erstwhile TV boyfriend Wentworth Miller in Prison Break, a show soon to make a comeback. (I am dubious about said comeback but I’ll probably try it at least once.)

Suits’ Mike is shown to his clean and modern looking cell (it looks more like a double-size freshman dorm room), the other half of which is decorated with photos and keepsakes. The guard tells him for no apparent reason that he is confined to his cell for the evening, whereupon new recurring character #2 appears: a bald guy in his forties who strolls in, jokingly yells at Mike for touching his stuff, tells him the first rule of prison is to trust no one, then engages him in an hours long heart-to-heart talk about how they each came to be there.

Bald guy’s name is Frank, and he’s got 5 years left to serve for insider trading, which he committed because he wanted to buy more and more expensive stuff, mainly for his kids, awww. He’s so sympathetic – he even offers Mike the use of a contraband cellphone he keeps under his pillow – that Mike opens up and tells him his story, then uses the phone to text Rachel that he is okay, and his cellmate is a good guy.

Except Frank isn’t so nice. Turns out he’s not Mike’s cellmate, nor is he in for insider trading. He bribed the guard to let him spend the evening there so he could get Mike to spill some dirt on Frank’s arch-nemesis Harvey Specter, the guy who put Frank away 13 years ago. Mike’s story telling was mostly done off-stage, so we’re not sure how much he implicated Harvey in the whole fraud thing, but Frank seems to think he’s acquired valuable information, including Rachel’s cell phone number. Uh-oh.

Meanwhile back at the office

The Unjailed Five spend the entire episode (and most of the night) in the office, wandering from empty space to empty space, grouping and regrouping, getting high, doing some smile-worthy comedic bits , alluding to movies (sigh), and reminiscing about dear departed Mike between spats about loyalty and family and Who’s with me? Once more unto the breach type speeches.

And during all this, the hair Rachel and Jessica are wearing looks amazing.

Some cracks show in the we-are-family, united-we-stand-divided-we-fall singalong sessions when Louis briefly suggests the firm name be changed to Pearson Litt, and Harvey almost leaves in a huff, only to return when Donna reminds him that Mike went to prison to save them all from going there.

But after the name partners get high together (Jessica, in gorgeous shoes – supplies the joints), and bond over Chinese food delivered by a sneaky process server, the team is ready to face the challenges before them, including that PSL has been hit with a $100 million class action suit contesting every case Mike Ross ever worked on.

To fight the suit will take money. After some verbal feinting and sparring, Harvey, Jessica and Louis reveal their net worth to each other. Louis has the most money, natch, and together they have enough to fight another day.

Their first instinct is to try to make the departed partners share in the suit. With the help of Ben, the faithful IT guy, who is still around because someone has to run the firm’s computer systems, they discover that the partners are up to various dirty tricks like giving notice to clients, and trying to bifurcate the firm and get back their buy-ins.

Louis comes up with the brilliant (?) plan of using their pooled financial resources to settle the class action suit for $10 million (good luck with that) which will mean they have nothing left to return the partners’ buy-ins, haha on the partners.